Dynamics

DFA; 2013

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As the progenitors of last decade's indie-dance boom hit their “Now what?” years, the definition for musical maturation stands to get a bit confused. Music that nods to a previous generation's styles also faces the pitfall of knowing how those styles ossified when their listenership aged-- a combination of more self-awareness and more conscious grabs for half-comfortable adaptation-- and artists are trying even more stringently to avoid it. Holy Ghost! appeared on the scene near the end of the DFA-dominated indie-house movement's first peak, and managed to capture their stake in that scene with a couple fantastic releases (2007's “Hold On”; 2010's “Static on the Wire” EP) and an ensuing album that, though slightly uneven, pointed towards a promising future. Too bad that future was contingent on the party going on forever-- nowadays listeners who cut their teeth on that sometimes overamped mid-00s heyday would sooner prop up their feet than get up and move them.

Naturally, Holy Ghost!'s second album, Dynamics, addresses that condition by pulling at all the strings its title implies. Their brightest disco/house tendencies, and the deep emotional highs that came with them, are heavily offset with an introspective melancholy or ruminative ambivalence that asks instead of urges. Holy Ghost! put their heart deep in their grooves, where it could be drawn out after repeated listens; feelings that came across as insinuations at first gradually moved inescapably to the forefront. The songs here, meanwhile, lay it all out in detail from the start: late-night phone calls that feel like cheap stage productions in an attempt to scramble back to reconciliation (“Okay”), the summer-haze energy drain that keeps aspirations from going anywhere until anxiety sets in (“Dumb Disco Ideas”), the Bloomberg-era NYC party grind that's turned the Manhattan/outer borough clubhopper circuit into a two-way route (“Bridge and Tunnel”). This is a record that sounds like it's meant to express little more than what a drag it is to try and maintain that youthful energy in the danceclub world-- including from the music-wonk side, if “Dance a Little Closer” is any indication (“And there'll be no big changes/ there'll be no asinine punchlines/ OK, one's fine”).

The obviousness of the lyrics isn't a huge problem. Cheap words sound like a million bucks with enough vision behind them, but Holy Ghost!'s unfocused attention is so divided between a bunch of new musical ideas that getting something to click on all fronts is a rare occurrence. As singles-and-filler as Holy Ghost! seemed, it did all fit together, one or two tricks done appealingly rather than half a dozen that scatter across a wide-grouped target. Emerging out of the old Brooklynite neo-disco wheelhouse of six years ago into something transitional shouldn't have to mean Zeliging one's way through Aspartame Fleetwood Mac (“I Wanna Be Your Hand”), a strip-mall suburb of Phoenix (“Changing of the Guard”), or the overblown beach-cruiser bombast of late 80s AOR-pop ballads (“It Must Be the Weather”).

So after throwing every kind of stylistic detour into the year-and-a-half recording process that eventually gave us Dynamics, it's the stay-the-course dancefloor material that proves the most rewarding. It's definitely not as of a type as their previous synthpop-skewing material was-- “Bridge and Tunnel” is big-budget Italo a'la Kano, the intricate armada of synthesizers on “Cheap Shots” draws a clear line from mid-80s Manchester electro back through the Berlin School of progressive electronics, and “Dance a Little Closer” and “Dumb Disco Ideas” are ür-DFA in IMAX. Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel can still crank out the heavy jams if they want to, and while half of the album feels overstuffed and overproduced, that hugeness does them a favor when it's applied to the pure dance cuts. Frankel's voice is still distinct, too-- clipped, sawed-off, and cool without being lifelessly aloof. (It helps when you can bring in Nancy Whang to push up the oomph on nearly half the tracks.) Unfortunately it's still too scattershot, proof that too many ideas can be even more of a detriment than not enough. That latter scenario held back their early work a little, but that's excusable; their first singles and the album that followed were the work of a band that was trying to figure out who they were. It's just a bit of a letdown to hear them, more than five years into their career, not having entirely answered that question.